No, the industry keeps growing every year in the amount of revenue generated and amount of players, devs teams and people working in the industry.
Particularly PlayStation, Nintendo, PC and mobile are breaking different kinds of all time records. Only Xbox home console hardware is dying, as happened before with Sega or other contenders.
Nothing leads to think a crash is coming. Yes, there were layoffs, but mostly because some companies were bloated or weren't performing good enough because their projects weren't good enough.
But most of this people got hired elsewhere or opened their own studio, and people who left the industry gets more than compensated with new devs who come from universities. The amount of studios, people in the industry and games under development keeps increasing.
AAA games require more people and time every new generation. This is the reason of why studios like ND that only had a single dev team are taking more time to release new AAA games.
The idea that videogames are "slowly dying" or that "there's no talent left" is not supported by any serious industry data.
From a macroeconomic standpoint, the videogame industry continues to expand. Global revenues have surpassed $180–190 billion annually, and forecasts still point to long-term growth, not contraction. The player base now exceeds 3.2 billion people worldwide, a figure that has increased steadily over the past decade. An industry that is losing relevance does not gain hundreds of millions of new users.
Employment numbers tell the same story. The total number of developers, studios, and professionals working in games has grown significantly, especially in Asia, Europe, and emerging markets. At the same time, development budgets, production scope, and technical complexity have reached levels that were unthinkable even 10–15 years ago.
Platform data is equally clear:
PlayStation continues to break records in software revenue and engagement, with first-party titles regularly selling very well.
Nintendo has one of the most successful hardware/software ecosystems in history, with evergreen IPs generating sustained sales across generations.
PC gaming is at an all-time high in terms of active users, live-service revenue, and high-end hardware adoption.
Mobile gaming alone represents roughly 50% of global gaming revenue, driven by massive user bases and long-term monetization models.
The only segment showing structural weakness is dedicated Xbox home console hardware, which is a platform-specific issue, not an industry-wide one. Similar shifts have happened before; Sega is the obvious historical example, without implying the decline of videogames as a medium.
What
has changed is audience perception. Many long-time players are experiencing fatigue, nostalgia bias, or diminishing novelty, and they confuse that personal feeling with an objective decline in quality or talent. But reduced emotional impact for an individual does not equal creative collapse.
Talent has not disappeared; it has spread across more genres, tools, and production scales. Finally, the forward-looking picture matters. The 2025–2026 release pipeline includes major new IPs, long-awaited sequels, and substantial technological upgrades that will likely reset many narratives currently driven by cynicism rather than evidence.
In short, videogames are not dying.
What's growing instead is disenchantment in part of the audience, amplified by online discourse. The numbers, however, tell a very different story.
